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Alphecca is a member of "the lunatic fringe of the US right" --Guardian (UK) 6/26/06 *******************
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All non-credited writings and photos on Alphecca.com are (C) Copyright 2002-2008 by Jeff Soyer All rights reserved. |
December 27, 2004$19.99 Digital Camera...Yeah yeah, so Glenn likes to chat-up digital cameras costing upwards of a grand or more. NOT US! Here at Alphecca we know real quality when we see it and we, er, seen it... Cumberland Farms is sorta the New England version of 7-11 and have they got a deal for you!
And folks, you can really tell that most of your hard-earned money is going for the plastic wrapper buying a sophisticated piece of crap of photographic equipment. Look at all you get:
And check out these specs:
The real question, of course, is: How good are the pictures? Now granted, we're not talking high resolution here, just snaps you can email to your friends. There's no flash, shutter speeds are from 1/6 - 1/15000 of a second so you better hold the camera steady. I hopped into the Alphecca Limo and headed into town to photograph one of the town landmarks, the old railroad station:
Well, I wouldn't try to blow-it-up... Notice the big fleshy thing in the bottom right corner? That's my schnoz! The camera has a wide field of view and if you use the optical viewfinder (there is no LCD one) your nose gets into the picture. I drove back home and tried for a detail shot (I've trimmed it a bit) of Kimo's porch food, just to see what resolution the camera has:
Not bad, actually. Well, not for $20 bucks, anyway. I tried an indoor shot (no flash!) by steadying the camera against the banister post:
That's the ever curious Crispy. My conclusions... Well, I'm not throwing away my Sony Mavica. But anyway: The camera has a USB port, sort-of. It's not a true USB device because your computer won't recognize it unless you install the Arc-Soft software. It's not a flash-disk memory, just sram. And sorry MAC users, it's only for PC Windows (yeah, I have an old one kicking around) and for about three times the price you could buy a digital with VGA resolution. Incidentally, if you leave it connected to your computer, you can (with the software) put it in continuous shoot mode for a low-budget web-cam. So, for two saw-bucks you get a cute toy that fits in your pocket and (at the resolution I was shooting at) takes 19 pictures. Many more if you don't mind looking at those photos through an electron microscope. This is the sort of toy you can use to take those blurry pictures of flying-saucers and bigfoot to send in to George Noory and Art Bell. Comments
There is another model, one that actually looks like a camera, but same company. I got it for X-mas. www.sharkcamera.com For poor people like me, who likely would never afford a real digital camera, it's pretty cool. (I think it basically is a web cam, with some memory added to take screen shots). Posted by: JeremyR at December 27, 2004 09:12 PMHell, it's better'n the coal oil powered camera I have! Posted by: Bubba at December 27, 2004 09:18 PMBut it doesn't come close to the image quality of the 35mm Pentax I got at Goodwill for $9.95. Latest pictures I posted of our canine were resampled down to 640 wide after cropping and still look better than that. Posted by: triticale at December 27, 2004 10:54 PMHey for $20 bucks beggars can't be choosers. But the picture quality was completely horrible. Posted by: Alexa at December 28, 2004 12:32 AMThis truly is a camera for the masses. Screw high resolution and any other sort of fancy stuff. This is all you need to send a snap shot. Posted by: Paul Phillips at December 28, 2004 01:03 AMThe old photog's saying is, "the best camera is the one you have with you." It may not be Glenn's prized D70, but it does take pix, and is right for the price. Posted by: Rife at December 28, 2004 02:15 AMhehe - great review! Where do i get one!? Posted by: Darren Rowse at December 28, 2004 02:29 AMThe sub-VGA resolution and lack of true USB is a show-stopper for me. OTOH, competing products are above the $20 impulse buy price point: The VuPoint I review is definitely a toy, and they make no bones about it. Even the ArcSoft driver is called "Toy Camera". It would probably make a nice gift for a young child since you wouldn't really care if they broke it or lost it, etc., and maybe it would plant the seeds for a future shutter-bug. Posted by: Jeff Soyer at December 28, 2004 12:44 PMThere are some $39.95 cameras but not "steady stock" so to speak. See, for example, http://www.softwareandstuff.com/CES10529.html which is a Vivitar 1.3MP deal. It's OK for horsing around... certainly better than the 19.95 toy. While it's got a 1.8" LCD, "Fixed focus f/2.8 lens" says it all :-) They do take Compact Flash memory cards, though. :Cheers. Posted by: Filipg at December 28, 2004 05:49 PMI have a similar cheapass camera, and looking at the specs, there's one GLARING problem they share. The 16 megs of RAM here? They're SDRAM, not flash. Which means if your battery dies, you lose your pictures. And also it's continually draining battery life, keeping the RAM refreshed. This is why my cheapass SiPix camera has never gotten used. If I'd know it wasn't flash, I never would have bought it. Posted by: Sigivald at December 28, 2004 06:57 PMThe old photog's saying is, 'the best camera is the one you have with you.' That's pretty much what I was thinking (a .380 in the pocket is better than a .45 in the safe). I've been shopping for a decent camera phone and, admittedly, the indoor shot of the cat appears to have come out clearer than what most camera phones will produce. Posted by: 356 at December 30, 2004 05:13 PMthe comment input form disappears. Your comments are welcome. You don't need to enter a URL and you don't need a "valid" email address, either. Note though that MT Blacklist is installed to flag suspiciously spam-like strings. Unfortunately, because of the bastard spammers, the strings "google.com" and "yahoo.com" (even in your email address) are currently banned as well. So are strings such as "cialis" (a common spam) which rules out words such as "socialism". Try putting a hyphan in a word like that. By Golly, you're reading an archived post. Click Here to head to the main page and read current stuff...Into science fiction? Check out my group blog novel, Colony: Alchibah. See the reader's guide there for first-timer tips. |
